Muslim Conversion?
Reader comment on item: Muslim Autonomous Zones in the West?

Submitted by Gilbert Mane (Australia), Jan 18, 2009 at 01:47

I was recently speaking to an elderly friend who is an Iraqi Jewess who lived in Paris for many years. She still has family in Paris and we were speaking of the "car-b-cue" of the Parisian "youths". And she said her relatives were telling her that their Muslim friends, particularly the mothers of these youths, were distraught at what their sons were doing but had no control over them. She also said that one of the untold factors in the situation was the large numbers of Muslims, particularly women, who had secretly converted to Christianity.

I was a bit surprised to hear this but I must say it made a sort of sense. if you were a female Muslim in a European (or US, Canadian or Australian) ghetto and peering out of your eye slit you saw non-Muslim girls leading free, happy lives - surely some of you would make the connection. And coming from a pious background the move to Christianity would seem an easier one than a secularist rejection of religion as a whole. There is of course the example of Masab Yousef, the son of Hamas leader Sheik Hassan Yousef, who is now an evangelical Christian. How many to create a tipping point?

Does anyone know about this phenomenon of Muslim conversion to Christianity? Could this be a fifth option which is presently sailing well below the radar?

---

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened for relevance, substance, and tone, and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome, but comments are rejected if scurrilous, off-topic, vulgar, ad hominem, or otherwise viewed as inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the Guidelines for Comments. For informational purposes, we identify countries from which comments are sent.

Daniel Pipes replies:

Yes, there is a trend of Muslim women to convert out. Khalid Duran and I analysed this at "Faces of American Islam[: Muslim Immigration]":

restrictions on meeting young Muslim women lead their male counterparts to look outside the community for companionship and sex, which leads inevitably to their getting involved with non-Muslim women and eventually marrying them. This diminishes the pool of Muslim men, leading Muslim women in turn to go out and find Christian men. A Muslim woman being forbidden to marry out, her taking a Christian husband is an act of defiance that effectively expels her from her community and sometimes even her own family, prompting more than a few of them to convert to Christianity.